Cultural Posthumanism
Death Grips is an American experimental hip hop group that correlates with many talking points in the posthuman condition. In addition, the group suggests the term accelerated music, which describes an equally accurate genre. Despite the many thematic similarities in post-internet artists, it is no surprise that musicians define a movement and a theory. Not surprisingly, the internet genre has focused on such issues, with its preoccupation with futuristic science fiction. In a posthumanist manifesto, the modern left instead rejects a question about the capitalist media of production. It embraces a tendency rather than such a philosophy of using a neoliberal infrastructure in building post-capitalist ideals.
Like the universal income base, it represents a more general tension in the philosophical discourse. It includes a systemic collapse into its vision but not on a drastically contradictory trajectory. To be able to describe a condition, Nagle compiles an opinion that the internet has played an essential role. The role is shaping the political mainstream. According to her, Reddit and other internet forums have become very influential forums and well-known for their memes or jokes. The bizarre virtual experiment created a multitude of inspections such as geeky arguments, suicide, misogynism, bloody images, and bizarre pornography. By detailing all types of beliefs, the love of dark humor challenges the political views people hold. It played as an infringement of self-interest. As such complexity, Death Grips assembles such a phenomenon into a condition where post-internet represents the condition of antihumanism.
Death Grips: Diversity
The Death Grips aesthetic is an overall reflection of the condition of such posthuman. The group is from Sacramento, California, consisting of band members, namely MC Ride as a vocal, Flatlander as an audio engineer, and Zach Hill as drummer and producer. In 2012, they released their first studio album entitled The Money Store. People often describe their musical style in the music media as experimental hip hop. Regardless of which, it is usually followed by an addition noting how difficult it is to categorize their music. It is difficult because genres such as industrial music, noise, punk, and nu-metal influenced them.
Ride illustrates the artistic intent of their band, representing the glorification of the gut, channeled but tapped before being raped by the law of reason. Apart from common expressions, the band has also used the internet to a great advantage throughout their career. Their attitude towards technology is also used to veer closer to the futurists’ embrace of all aspects of modernism. In particular, their music is dense and evokes a sense of information overload as a deliberate effect. According to Hill, they wanted to keep things at an everyday level. They want to be able to talk about getting out of the listener’s mind on drugs or other highly addictive distractions. In short, they want to be relevant to more abstract aspects, such as the internet but want to coexist with the highest intelligence that occurs in the same realm.
The Transgressive Distortion
The band’s ambivalent attitude towards information technology was a critical factor in inspiring critics and scholars alike to fight for the essence of music. Death Grips is one of the few well-known musical artists that people define as the posthuman condition. In other words, post-internet people define loosely, generally about the effects of the internet on society, culture, and aesthetics. In such cases, the effect is primarily about identity and crisis, manifesting in everyone as a blurring line between existence and technology. Despite being similar to many themes, most anthropocentrism influenced technology to replace modernist society. People often say the band treats its approach to art as an open-source collaboration with more than just an audience.
However, it is also with the general public. The way the bands talk to their audience on uncensored message boards, even on album art, significantly influences their processual approach to art. The more distorted traditional promotions are, the more they obscure their presence with participation. Such anonymous offenders are not only crucial to how listeners define the band. However, the kind of youth activity that creates transgressive memes has created political developments that serve as the first question mark. It influenced the band’s mainstream. To sum up, one can place the band in the post-internet genre in several essential terms. Most of their lyrics deal with internet-specific issues such as privacy, piracy, graphic content, hacking, and the web.
Post-irony
Many Death Grips songs depict a particular condition on the struggle for power and digital technology factors as another framework for such a posthuman. Guillotine, their most famous song, depicts a chain of human beings acting as reality, changing each other’s perspective and eliminating one of the psychological inputs of freedom on the internet with a lot of meta and irony. Using a formal structural framework, the spatial mixing technique in the song makes its listeners confused about the mature avant-garde abrasive.
Besides Guillotine, No Love and I’ve Seen Footage also depicts a result of overexposure to graphic content on the internet and personal computing in monitoring its users. The overall effect of the song’s work reproduces the informational effect of bodily anxiety and technology in interaction with one another. In harmony with other post-internet artwork ideas, it acts as a process instead of still working. The band has released many albums where instrumentals and ambiance become individual tracks for each to sample and mix into new versions. A straightforward medium in post-internet entertainment is YouTube Poop or YTP. It is a type of mashup or video edit that people create by mixing or editing existing media sources. Bringing subcultural significance to the new video aims to be both a joke and a satire.
Dystopia of Anti-capitalism
When critics compare the posthuman condition and the Death Grips, one can surmise many similarities. Post-internet music has always addressed many vital topics where the boundary between factual and imaginary is blurred. It resets the body and the mind due to information and technology overload. On the other hand, the individual can consider how acceleration often acts as a fictional and other artistic expressions. The popular music subgenre with the theme of acceleration is a kind of extension of a movement. A feeling of an impending apocalypse often characterizes the band’s portrayal of reality.
Therefore, it is a perception of its unavoidable nature that technology anxiety is generated. In Culture Shock, Death Grips shows how the struggle for survival on the internet is a form of depression slowly. Despite being only a logical choice, it addresses a broader nature of anti-capitalism, justified by the perception of increasing economic inequality in an accelerationist future. People follow more hegemonic norms, which are used to control people significantly. Death Grips becomes the exclusive status of such an ideology by tension, taken from such a position to a goal of self-destruction. The inability to participate in culture results in a dystopian depiction of tension so severe that privileged people can change individual lives with technology not available to everyone.
No Love Deep Web
In Hacker, the song depicts a fierce struggle for digital means for people to hack, steal, and beat anonymous internet people. The band’s description of the public as futurist primitivists further implies an interest in posthumanist concepts. However, with limited means, maintaining an uncontrolled drug habit is an act. The depiction of the band’s exclusive lifestyle consistently portrays the profound ugliness of such scenarios. When placed in context with other song subjects, it supports anti-capitalist readings. Such an act instills a perception of the inevitable acceleration. No alternative is imagined unless death is considered an option.
Transgressive modernist art seeks to break away from social constraints. Doing so achieves a radicalism beyond posthumanist art, entirely immanent but rather a modulation of intensity on the spot. On the hyper-capitalist side of accepting such a position, the band expressed a much harsher reaction to the song regarding the position of increasing the gap. Another significant influence of posthumanism occurred in the future or the modern era. However, it is never evenly distributed. While one might view the band’s actions as an embrace of internet opportunity, Death Grips is more likely to portray the uglier aspects of the internet subculture. No Love Deep Web and other content about the titular deep web are examples.
Internet Trolls
In No Love Deep Web, the album most often depicts public awareness dwindling to a place where one can sell and buy drugs easily. It also hosts uncensored discussions that internet forums represent a more accessible version of anonymous access. People can take one example on the theme and influence of the 4chan forums. The forum takes a history of violations as an example, taken from Death Grips’ first full release entitled Beware. The song discusses explicitly going beyond the morality of religious enslaved people into animals of individual worship. In detail, 4chan’s transgressive discourse, such as sexual aggression, instinctive desires, and surrealism, looks similar to the theme of the band’s lyrics.
When the content is very dark, the listener’s stream of consciousness lyrics fill up absurd lines in troll style and are tailor-made for memes. Like all conceptual depictions of transgressive behavior, 4chan engages the band differently. All kinds of traditional representations of pop bands tend to be like trolls to act against expectations. The band also maintains a common thread aesthetic that is important to their music videos and other visual arts. By doing such things, they simultaneously stay true to the audience’s primitive intentions while also being easily replicated by the audience. Like trolls, parodies are only a tiny part of the meme culture surrounding the band they belong to. It acts as an essential part of all anonymous’s online presence, allowing listeners to engage with their artistic process at the tree level. In conclusion, it affects the art produced and even the product itself.
Occupy Wall Street, 4chan, and Anonymous
In the early 2010s, Death Grips formed and quickly rose to prominence. At the same time, several political events involved the effective use of the internet as cyber utopianism. Along with the hacktivist and anonymous movement, it is a great time like Occupy Wall Street for mass public square protests. All happened sequentially, characterized as the digital counter-revolution of emptiness. One by one, the initial promises of the movement were shattered because they did not deliver an action as promised. Anonymous is present with unaffiliated 4chan users who sympathize with Occupy, not expressing themselves on the board.
Therefore, create a troll culture of political correctness with various libertarian discourses by more anti-rightists. On the other hand, Death Grips faces a big challenge because it is very antagonistic toward the technological process. However, the more intrusive nature of the internet began to emerge just after the band reached mainstream levels of success by portraying more romantic presentations. Before forcing the world to confront the dark underbelly of internet culture, they released The Money Store. In the modern era, WikiLeaks and Anonymous will always be portrayed as having liberal and leftist goals. The alliance between them was more difficult for concise people in the following years. Hackers and the internet also express unconventional sentiments to others of a nebulous nature.
Embracing the Post-internet
Death Grips not only fits the definition of post-internet music but discusses the posthuman condition. With unique content, they also take a processual approach to art by taking esoteric samples and mentioning attributes that need attention. They differed from their post-internet contemporaries primarily in their portrayal of MC Ride. On the other hand, many postmodern internet artists also embrace a fluidity towards emancipation and digital identity. Ride’s status manifestation shows little sign of wanting to be different from a hobo and black persona. By producing a prophecy on its own, appearance acts like a beast while trying to live on by any means gradually.
The status is a source of hatred in society, an outsider’s nihilistic pride. The interaction between the listener and the band may show the most prominent connection with acceleration, treating the approach to art as an open collaboration with the world. It involves the audience in its process in several ways. After all, whether 4chan, the internet, or the political activist movement is a controversial group of transgressive trolls, the mainstream explores a style of discourse more explicitly from multiple angles. With much overlap between audience and artist, Death Grips fully embraces a shared discourse, represents a larger whole, and reinforces an influence. After all, Death Grips is always online, no matter what the time, in the future.
Bibliography
- Badmington, N. (Ed.). (2000). Posthumanism. Macmillan International Higher Education.
- Hawkins, G. M. (2016). “Whatever I Want:” Death Grips, Disobedience and the Music Industries.
- Kenttä, V. J. (2019). Gender performances as a response to accelerationism Self-destructive masculinity in the post-internet music of Death Grips (Doctoral dissertation, University of Oulu).
